Some time ago I wrote a post entitled Ten Reasons Not to Go to Law School. Go here to read it. Number 7 cited the cost of legal education:

The cost of a legal education has become frighteningly high. Being a newly minted attorney, earning $40,000.00 a year and having 100k of debt, is not a good situation. I graduated with $7,000.00 of debt by comparison in 82, and I thought that was frighteningly high at the time.

Paul Caron at Tax Prof Blog notes an article from National Jurist that law school faculties are 40% larger than just a decade ago:

Well we all know who gets to pay for all those extra law profs don’t we? The comments to the article are scathing:

“I have a son who despite nearly hysterical objections from me took on $150,000 in debt to gt a JD. (“What do you know, Dad?”)

He is working, but who knows for how long. The law school that helped put him so much in debt was Northeastern. The administration of that school never acknowledged any moral responsibility for assisting an immature young man to get so deeply into debt. When I talked to Dean Emily Spieler and said she had to take in fewer students or lower tuition, she said, more less, “But I’d have to lay off administrators to do that.”

In other words, “Protecting youngsters might cost our institution something, so it’s out of the question.”

My anger about this is intense. Some day someone will write a play about this kind of situation. I envision a very angry Al Pacino or someone playing the father enraged that his child has been led astray and into a lifetime of debt by self-centered law school administration vacuosities.”

“Hyperinflation. That’s the answer to everything that ails us: high consumer debt, student loan debt, the national debt, the real estate crash, how to “fix” social security and entitlements (“hey you old greedy lazy socialist bastards, here’s you $10 a month in 2005 dollars, just like we promised!”).

I never thought, when I reached thirty, I’d never thought I’d be watching the collapse of the American socio-economic-political system. Let alone cheering for it to happen.” Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I wrote about tensions, existing or potential, between the libertarian and social conservative elements in the tea party movement. Whereas before I was speaking of Christians in a broad and general sense, I will now turn to what I think the Catholic response to the tea party ought to be.

As I looked into this topic, I was dismayed by the utter predictability of responses from across the Catholic spectrum. The rad-trad response was irrational as always; the leftist response as arrogant and contemptuous as ever; and the mainstream response was unimaginative. Granted this is a very small sampling, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was accurately representative of these currents.

28% of the tea party movement, according to the one poll we have so far, is Catholic. This means Catholics are slightly over-represented in the movement. As I also reported last time, 68% of tea partiers attend religious services regularly; for Catholics, that ought to mean they go to Mass every Sunday. Now one thing I think I can say that isn’t very controversial is that when it comes to fidelity to the Church’s teaching on non-negotiable issues, such as abortion, marriage, and parental education rights, Catholics that regularly attend Mass are doing a heck of a lot better than Catholics who don’t. So these Catholics that are faithful to Church teaching on important issues are also supporting the tea party; that to me is an indicator that there is little in the tea party that fundamentally contradicts Church teaching.